Niko
Chapter twenty
The chisels were already sharp, but I sharpened them anyway.
I worked through the entire rack in order, coarse stone to fine, stropped each one, and checked the edges against my thumbnail. Every edge caught.
The blanket chest had gone out two days ago. The client met me at her door and ran her hand over the lid and said it was more than she’d hoped for. I drove home with the blankets she’d wrapped the payment in, because she insisted the check ride inside something soft.
A new commission sat milled and stickered on the bench, a hall table in cherry for a couple in Andersonville. I stood over it with the marking gauge in my hand and then put it down.
You don’t cut when half your mind is somewhere else. It was a rule, and my mind hadn’t been somewhere else as consistently since my grandfather passed three years ago.
I’d been right. I kept arriving at that as I stood over the cherry.
I’d offered him an invitation to move us forward, and I’d spent weeks learning the difference between his real yes and the other one precisely so I couldn’t be fooled when it mattered.
He gave me one of the empty answers, and I’d closed us down. I was right.
A decade of clients had taught me what being right was worth. It was worth exactly the price of the piece. It fixed nothing, and it built nothing new. A correct diagnosis of rot doesn’t save the board. I had the diagnosis, but I didn’t have Rafe.
My phone buzzed on the tool tray a little after nine.
Rafe: finished sanding the practice board. 320 felt like glass at the end
I read it standing at the bench. He’d kept the practice board and worked through the sanding grits alone in his apartment.
I typed: That’s the surface telling you it’s done. Bring it by and I’ll show you what oil does to it. Shop’s open tomorrow.
I looked at it. My reflex was to offer an invitation as always. He’d taken it every time, and every time he walked through my door I got more of him. At least that’s what I thought.
I deleted the message and finally sent my response that night.
Niko: That’s the surface telling you it’s done. Anything past 320 on oak just burnishes it and the finish won’t take.
It was factually true and nothing more. It was the answer you’d get from any seasoned woodworker.
I cleaned the stones and wiped down the bench. At the end, square to the edge, the block plane sat where Rafe left it. I picked it up and put it away.
***
Two nights later the Ironhawks played Columbus, and I watched the whole thing from a stool with the phone propped against the tool tray.
The fans responded to Rafe the way they had since the arrangement with Max had been revealed.
Chet talked around it the first period, and by the second he gave up and named it.
“You can hear the response every time Mikkelsen touches the puck,” he said, “and I’ll be honest, I’ve been in this booth a long time, and I don’t understand this town tonight. ”
He scored in the second on the play Chet called the fake bump. Rafe skated to the bench with his head level while Heath hit him on the helmet. He set up two more goals in the third, and they won by two. The crowd went home having consistently booed the best player in the building.
My phone buzzed.
Max: watched the game. your boy had himself a night
Max: that’s it. that’s the whole text. no agenda. checking in on my hermit brother
I sent my response:
Niko: He’s not my boy. Good game though.
I stared at the dots while Max typed on the other end. Then they stopped, and no message arrived. When it finally came, the message was brief.
Max: I think I read it wrong. Send again.
I didn’t send an answer. That would tell him he read it right.
***
A chair arrived the following morning.
The woman who brought it introduced herself as Ruth Kowalski, and she carried it up from her car herself, hooked over one arm, waving me off when I came out to help. It was a kitchen chair, oak, factory-made sometime around World War II, with a saddle seat and a steam-bent crest rail.
“My father’s chair,” she said, and set it down between us on the shop floor. “I want it fixed properly, and I’ve been told you’re the man who fixes things properly. It has been repaired in the past, and I know it’s wrong.”
I crouched and looked closer. There were screws run up through the seat into the leg posts, four different kinds from four different decades, slotted and Phillips both.
There was a length of wire twisted around the stretchers under the seat, tightened with pliers until it bit into the wood.
Under all the mistakes, the original joinery was there: mortise and tenon, cut by a machine but cut correctly.
“He fixed it every time it wobbled,” Ruth said.
“Every time, for as long as I can remember. It sat at his end of the table, and when it wobbled, he’d turn it over on a Saturday and get the drawer out of the basement, the junk drawer, and do something to it.
My mother wanted to leave it on the curb thirty years ago. I never let her.”
“He never re-glued the joints.”
“He didn’t know what he was supposed to do,” she said. “He drove a delivery truck. Nobody ever showed him what made a chair a chair. He knew screws and wire.” She touched the crest rail. “I’ll pay whatever you charge to bring it back.”
I told her I needed a week. She said, “Thank you,” and left the chair with me.
I got it up on the bench and started in with a screwdriver. Every screw was a wound. Every wrap of wire was an attempt at bandaging. I backed out the screws and laid them in a coffee can. At the tenth one, I realized something.
The man wasn’t fighting with his chair. He was figuring out how to keep it.
I sat back on the stool and looked at what was actually in front of me. It was four decades of blunt repairs aimed at keeping the chair at the end of his table. It meant something to him, and it outlived him. As furniture repair, it was a disaster, but the man’s devotion to it was flawless.
I heard Rafe in my head. Sure. Yeah. Whatever works.
I understood his words the way I first understood the screws; they were careless damage. In reality, they were an attempt at making something durable with the only tools he had.
I’d bet the shop that nobody had ever taught Rafe how to respond to a man he wanted. He didn’t know he could say, “I’m scared,” and have the joints hold. All he had in his junk drawer was the smooth answer.
The chair wobbled because the repairs were wrong, but the chair was still around because the man refused to let it go.
Being right about Rafe was one of the worst things I’d ever done. It cost me him, and I’d spent days now justifying putting us out by the curb.
I sat with the chair between my hands and tried to figure out what to do next. A text wasn’t right. It would invite a response, and Rafe would have to guess again at the best words.
I revisited my response to Max. It makes it a product I can never take off the shelf. That was true, but wasn’t permanence the whole point? That’s why Ruth wanted her chair fixed.
After setting the screwdriver down, I picked up my phone and called Max.
He picked up before the second ring finished.
“Hey.”
“I’ll do the video,” I said.
The silence lasted for almost thirty seconds. I heard brief typing in the background, so I knew he hadn’t hung up.
“When?” he asked.
“You tell me. You’re the professional.”
“Tomorrow night. Are you free?”
“I’m working on a chair, but it’ll keep.”
“The Ironhawks are home against Minnesota. The game ends around nine thirty, and I’ll come by after at ten or so. We’ll shoot it clean and simple. You’ll stand there hating it, but we won’t give you time to overthink it. We’ll put it up the same night.”
“Max, before you hang up and start ordering equipment, tell me the numbers one more time.”
“What numbers?”
“Half a million new followers. The brands that came back. The podcast and the morning show that’s holding a slot.” I kept my voice even. “The minute this posts, you’re no longer the victim. I want to hear you say you understand that.”
“I understand,” Max said. “I did the math before I ever drove to your shop. Honestly, the mattress company would never survive due diligence anyway. I’ve slept on that mattress, and I’d be telling people’s backs a lie.
” That was Max in full bloom. “Niko, I’ve been waiting by this phone for days hoping you’d change your mind.
The money was never what I wanted out of this. ”
I looked at the chair. Every bad screw aimed at keeping it.
“One question,” I said. “When it goes up. What does it ask of him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he’s spent weeks now with the world demanding answers out of him.
He does his best to manufacture one, but that doesn’t satisfy the beast.” I stopped.
“I refuse to add my confession to the pile of things he has to answer for. If this thing lands on him like one more media question, I’d rather keep it to myself. ”
Max was quiet for a moment, and when he answered, he sounded like the man that made two million people trust him with their houses.
“Our post asks nothing of him,” he said. “It sits there, and he finds it when he finds it. He can watch it two dozen times before deciding what he thinks. He can avoid mentioning it if he wants to.” A pause. “That’s why it’s the right tool. It’s his choice whether he adopts it.”
“Tomorrow, then,” I said.
“Tomorrow. And Niko, wear the apron. Don’t dress up. I mean it. You look like you’re going to a funeral when you try. I love you. Don’t try to sharpen anything.”
***
Max arrived with three cases and a duffel. He walked backward through the shop’s front door, dragging it all with him.
“Eight years,” he said. “For eight years I’ve been trying to get a camera into this room.”
“Set up before I have time to think about it.”